“The Peace of God”, A Homily preached by the Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, May 1, 2011 at Church of the Ascension, Rochester, New York
Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”
Take a moment and let your imagination drift to a scene that evokes peace for you. What do you envision when you think of peace? What has brought you peace in your life? When I have done this exercise in small group meditations, people have all sorts of different images of peace. For some, it is lying in a canoe on a glassy pond looking up at a blue sky on a warm summer afternoon. For others, it is gazing upon the face of a sleeping baby, like our baptisand Bailey who slept peacefully through our baptismal preparation meeting on Monday evening. Or, listening to the sound of waves pounding the shore at the ocean, feeling the sand between your toes and smelling the salty sea air. Or sitting in an armchair listening to your favorite music, or reading a good book armed with a cup of tea or coffee or good wine. Or spending an evening with a close friend, or watching a fire blazing in the fireplace on a snowy winter’s night, or sitting around a campfire by a lake on a warm summer’s eve. Whatever your particular vision of peace is, I doubt that it includes images of wounds, scars, death, torture or scenes of hiding and fear.
In our gospel story today, Jesus appears to his frightened disciples on Easter night, as they gather in a locked room. They have gathered in secret, fearing for their own lives, afraid that his fate might befall them. They are dejected, discouraged, defeated, their hopes and dreams for him having been shattered by the events of Good Friday. They have heard stories of his resurrection from some women, but they don’t yet believe in what they’ve heard because, of course, women are presumptively non-credible witnesses. They don’t know what to do with themselves, or where to go next. Then suddenly he appears, entering the locked room without unlocking the door, and greets them with the same words he left them with at the Last Supper. “Peace be with you.”
The writer of John’s gospel wants to show us what God’s peace looks like and it doesn’t seem to be a lot like the images we would have conjured up for ourselves. The peace of God seems to be a peace that comes to us in the midst of turmoil, of fear, of hiding, of pain and death, of scars and wounds and torture. Both of the appearances that Jesus makes in that upper room, according to John, come in the midst of difficult and trying times. God’s peace seems to have more to do with our approach to suffering and pain and tribulation, than it does with simple, feel-good non-conflictual happiness.
When Jesus appears to his disciples he still bears the wounds of his crucifixion experience. He has endured the cross and grave and he is marked forever by that experience. The peace he offered the disciples at the Last Supper came just as he was preparing to go to the cross and die. And the peace he offers now comes after the cross, after the suffering and pain. The marks of his experience on the cross are now part and parcel of the peace he offers. “Peace be with you” he says to them each time he greets them, as they gather in fear, locked away from view, afraid of the wrath of their enemies.
Notice too that immediately after he says to them, “Peace be with you” he breathes the Holy Spirit upon them and sends them out to do his work in the world, his work of reconciliation and healing, preaching and teaching. These frightened disciples, who are afraid to meet together in public, who deserted him at his darkest hour are now being transformed into apostles, which means “one who is sent.” They are being offered the peace from God that will drive them right out into the midst of the fray, where they will confront the authorities, the principalities and forces that attempted to destroy their leader.
Peter, who denied Jesus when the chips were down, leaves that room to go on and proclaim Jesus’ message to all who will listen. Peter goes forth from that room, empowered by God’s peace to do God’s work in the world, despite the dangers to which that ministry subjects him. Peter’s reward for having received the peace of God was that he was ultimately crucified, head down. This peace of God is not a peace that sends us comfortably home to rest and be content. It sends us into the world, to confront all the evil and pain that is not of God and to fight against those forces with our very lives.
God’s peace is something that liberates us from all that binds us up and keeps us locked into our own private selves. In the reading from Acts we get a picture of the very earliest church where every member of the church liquidated all his or her earthly belongings and donated them to a common pool so that all members of the community would have what they needed to live and thrive. The profound faith of those early believers liberated them from the comforts and security of their own personal wealth and enabled them to give away all earthly security blankets so that they would be free to serve God unencumbered by conflicting loyalties or misplaced priorities. They were no longer imprisoned by their concern for their material wealth. When they were able to free themselves by that radical act of self-emptying, that very risky act of faith, they were also empowered to be apostles of the Risen Lord and the early church grew by leaps and bounds. The peace of God empowered them to give away everything and put all their trust in God.
Jesus offers his special peace to Thomas in the midst of Thomas’ doubt. He invites Thomas to touch him, to know him by the wounds and scars that did him in. God’s peace comes to us in the midst of our doubts too. Doubts are an integral part of faith, especially when things seem to go horribly wrong, when events do not unfold as we expected them to. When the women got to the tomb on Easter morning and found it empty, events still were not going according to plan, even though the resurrection was a wonderful miracle. Resurrection life is all about surprise and mystery, and about having the courage to walk into the tomb of death and darkness in the midst of doubt and fear because only there will the peace and glory of resurrection be revealed. When things seem to be awry we often doubt – we doubt God, we doubt ourselves, we wonder whether the promises of God that we were taught about in Sunday school have any real meaning for our lives. These moments of doubt are moments pregnant with the possibility of that “peace of God which passes all understanding” that “peace of God that is no peace.”
Faith is the opposite of certainty. Faith includes all those moments of doubt, those times when we need to reach out and touch God in some way to assure ourselves that the promises of God in which we believed were not mere illusion. Frederick Beuchner once declared that “Doubt is the ants in the pants of faith.” Those moments of doubt and skepticism, those moments of questioning and wondering are moments of tremendous opportunity, moments when we may find the courage to reach out and touch God in ways we’ve never done before. Thomas was lucky to have the Risen Christ right before him in bodily form so he could reach out and touch that body. We have to rely on prayer and the presence of the Risen Christ in the sacraments and in the faces of our brothers and sisters in Christ within our faith community. When we find ourselves engulfed in doubt, we have to act as if we believe by taking risks for the gospel, by accepting challenges and ministries we never thought we could manage, trusting that God has gone ahead of us to Galilee and is waiting there to welcome us as we do God’s work in the world.
In our moments of doubt, when peace seems illusive, our Christian community serves as the buffer to those moments of disequilibrium. When we are baptized into Christian community we make promises and become part of a community dedicated to sharing the good news of God in Christ and to upholding one another when the journey gets rocky. Bailey Adam will be baptized into our Christian community in a few moments and in so doing he joins a community of the Risen Christ who will uphold him on his journey and believe for him when he cannot do so, pray for him when he has no words to pray, and send him out do work for peace and justice, to love his neighbor, to be a part of the body of the Risen Christ in his world as he matures.
Have you ever noticed how the people who seem most at peace in this world are not those who have had easy lives, lives unmarked by tragedy, illness, or misfortune? Quite the contrary. The deep peace of God which passes all understanding seems most accessible to those who have known suffering and pain, who have been through the wringer and somehow survived to laugh and love again. Recovering addicts, cancer survivors, persons with AIDS, martyrs like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Gandhi, those people who choose to do the most difficult work for God on earth, like Mother Teresa, people who’ve lived through terrible family crises like abuse, or divorce, or the death of a child or spouse, people who’ve suffered great tragedies in their lives like all those families who lost loved ones in war or the spate of natural disasters that are hitting our world with alarming frequency. Many of such people that I’ve met have a deeper sense of God’s peace than folks who’ve not traveled such hard roads. Just as Jesus brought his peace to those disciples in that locked room in the midst of their darkest hour of fear and doubt, so God’s peace often finds us when we are most vulnerable, most in despair and pain, most fearful about the future. God opens our locked hearts, filled with despair and sadness and floods us with a sense of God’s enduring love, which no earthly pain can destroy. The peace of God gives us the courage we need to move forward in spite of our fear and doubt.
God’s peace is not the kind of peace we humans might at first envision. No, as my favorite hymn, 661 so poignantly puts it, The peace of God it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod. Yet let us pray for but one thing, the marvelous peace of God. May you know the deep peace of God this Eastertide as you move into the world as apostles of the Risen Christ. Amen.
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